Read Online You Must Remember This by Robert J. Wagner - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert J. Wagner
Ads: Link
deserted,” says William Holden as Joe Gillis at the opening of Sunset Boulevard . “It was a great big white elephant of a place. The kind crazy movie people built in the crazy twenties.”
Billy’s attitude was typical. The rap against the architecture of Los Angeles was that it was nothing but a conglomeration of warring styles. But that’s because Los Angeles had a very small indigenous population; it was settled by people who streamed there before and after World War I. All these new arrivals were from different parts of the world and all of them had different ideas of taste; with the exception of the Mission style that was the legacy of Spanish California, there was no strong architectural tradition to guide a building boom.
Initially the movie people settled in and around Hollywood Boulevard, and the bungalows that had been part of the initial settlement around 1900 were replaced by the Spanish Mediterranean look that became the first wave of popular style.
There were also apartments that catered to the movie people who were holding on to their money to see whether this movie thing had any permanence. A lot of them were built around courtyards, with fountains and Spanish tile. Of these, the most elaborate was the Garden Court, which stood on Hollywood Boulevard into the 1970s. Sixty years earlier the Garden Court had refused to take people from the movie industry, with very few exceptions, such as the very proper Englishman J. Stuart Blackton, who founded the early motion picture firm Vitagraph.
But if blame is to be apportioned for what Beverly Hills is today, it should probably go to Douglas Fairbanks.
In the beginning, Beverly Hills was all beans, acres of beans, and the only people who lived there were Mexican migrant workers. But after 1900, oil was discovered in what would become West Hollywood and land began changing hands. The land was now too valuable to be relegated to farmland, so it was divided up into residential lots.
To do the landscaping and planning, the landscape architect Wilbur Cook Jr. was hired. Cook had worked on the design of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago alongside Frederick Law Olmsted, who was famed for his design of New York’s Central Park.
Cook laid out a three-tier system. People without a lot of money were relegated to small lots in the area around Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards. The area of Beverly Hills that lay “below the tracks” of the Pacific Electric railroad along Santa Monica Boulevard came with restrictive covenants that forbade blacks or Asians from buying, owning, or even residing there except as live-in servants. Cook also made space for a commercial zone that was close to the large houses and estates to the north.
North of Santa Monica and south of Sunset was for the upper middle class, with large houses, wide lots, and streets lined with trees of identical size and species. (These guys left nothing to chance.) The hills above Sunset Boulevard were reserved for mansions.
What Cook wanted to avoid was a grid plan of straight lines and squares, which would inevitably lead to views of empty fields extending toward the ocean. What he designed were largely curving streets, which led to a procession of constantly changing views. He used garden hoses to mark off the curves of the streets, forming the borders of the roads. The curves created a feeling of coziness, of community.
The first lots went on sale for eight hundred to a thousand dollars an acre, with a 10 percent discount if paid in cash and another 10 percent discount if construction started within a year. The original streets were Rodeo, Beverly, Canon, and Crescent Drives. Beverly Park sat between Beverly and Canon, which had a beautiful koi pond and a sign announcing that you were now in Beverly Hills—as if there could be any doubt.
Wilbur Cook’s original plan for Beverly Hills. Notice the winding, curvy roads.
For a long time, Beverly Hills remained quite barren because
Billy’s attitude was typical. The rap against the architecture of Los Angeles was that it was nothing but a conglomeration of warring styles. But that’s because Los Angeles had a very small indigenous population; it was settled by people who streamed there before and after World War I. All these new arrivals were from different parts of the world and all of them had different ideas of taste; with the exception of the Mission style that was the legacy of Spanish California, there was no strong architectural tradition to guide a building boom.
Initially the movie people settled in and around Hollywood Boulevard, and the bungalows that had been part of the initial settlement around 1900 were replaced by the Spanish Mediterranean look that became the first wave of popular style.
There were also apartments that catered to the movie people who were holding on to their money to see whether this movie thing had any permanence. A lot of them were built around courtyards, with fountains and Spanish tile. Of these, the most elaborate was the Garden Court, which stood on Hollywood Boulevard into the 1970s. Sixty years earlier the Garden Court had refused to take people from the movie industry, with very few exceptions, such as the very proper Englishman J. Stuart Blackton, who founded the early motion picture firm Vitagraph.
But if blame is to be apportioned for what Beverly Hills is today, it should probably go to Douglas Fairbanks.
In the beginning, Beverly Hills was all beans, acres of beans, and the only people who lived there were Mexican migrant workers. But after 1900, oil was discovered in what would become West Hollywood and land began changing hands. The land was now too valuable to be relegated to farmland, so it was divided up into residential lots.
To do the landscaping and planning, the landscape architect Wilbur Cook Jr. was hired. Cook had worked on the design of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago alongside Frederick Law Olmsted, who was famed for his design of New York’s Central Park.
Cook laid out a three-tier system. People without a lot of money were relegated to small lots in the area around Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards. The area of Beverly Hills that lay “below the tracks” of the Pacific Electric railroad along Santa Monica Boulevard came with restrictive covenants that forbade blacks or Asians from buying, owning, or even residing there except as live-in servants. Cook also made space for a commercial zone that was close to the large houses and estates to the north.
North of Santa Monica and south of Sunset was for the upper middle class, with large houses, wide lots, and streets lined with trees of identical size and species. (These guys left nothing to chance.) The hills above Sunset Boulevard were reserved for mansions.
What Cook wanted to avoid was a grid plan of straight lines and squares, which would inevitably lead to views of empty fields extending toward the ocean. What he designed were largely curving streets, which led to a procession of constantly changing views. He used garden hoses to mark off the curves of the streets, forming the borders of the roads. The curves created a feeling of coziness, of community.
The first lots went on sale for eight hundred to a thousand dollars an acre, with a 10 percent discount if paid in cash and another 10 percent discount if construction started within a year. The original streets were Rodeo, Beverly, Canon, and Crescent Drives. Beverly Park sat between Beverly and Canon, which had a beautiful koi pond and a sign announcing that you were now in Beverly Hills—as if there could be any doubt.
Wilbur Cook’s original plan for Beverly Hills. Notice the winding, curvy roads.
For a long time, Beverly Hills remained quite barren because
Similar Books
